Category: TV

Roll on buddy

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
The back deck this evening around dark-thirty.
The back deck this evening around dark-thirty.

Jeebus. One of those days, to be sure.

I got up this morning, went straight to work, and with time outs to prepare two meals I’ve pretty much been at it ever since. If I’m so busy, how come I ain’t rich?

We got a nice little snowfall today. I moved some of it around this morning and should’ve moved some more this afternoon. What the hell, it will still be there tomorrow, and it will have company. Good for the lawn, what there is of it, and good for the trees. Good for me, too, as we have no gym membership and pushing the mouse around hardly qualifies as strength conditioning.

Speaking of wintertime activities, remember: Cyclo-cross worlds kick off tomorrow with the junior men and elite women. If you’re so inclined (and so equipped), you can stream the action at Universal Sports. Other possibilities include the various feeds at Cyclingfans.com and the UCI. Geo-restricted options may be workable using Hola — I downloaded a Firefox extension for same to the old MacBook and it seems to pull in the UCI feed just fine.

And don’t let me catch any of yis rooting for Marianne Vos. Lovely person, tremendous athlete, stout competitor, and to hell with all that. It’s time to be a shameless homer, goddamnit. Katie Compton über alles!

All systems normal

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
So far, so good. Two more OS updates and we'll have a casual relationship with the 21st century.
So far, so good. Two more OS updates and we’ll have a casual relationship with the 21st century.

One down, two to go. I forgot we also have a Mac Mini in need of an OS upgrade. But the cute li’l Cupertino doorstop only has 2 GB of memory, which is the bare minimum, so I’ve ordered up some mo’.

The MacBook Air install went smooth like butter. The whole process took a shade over two hours, with a long-ass download, a couple-three restarts and six app’ updates. But that’s my newest machine, a mid-2012 model, so it should be open to new experiences; the Mini dates to mid-2010, and the iMac to 2009.

The Air is for lightweight road trips when an iPad won’t cut the mustard. For heavy duty I haul an old black MacBook, ’cause it has software I don’t care to upgrade, like Word and Photoshop and all the other high-falutin’ gewgaws, thingamajigs and comosellamas a fella likes for professional rumormongery of the finest quality. That beast is too long in the tooth to run Mavericks; it’s pegged at Snow Leopard.

The Mini is for watching TV at Chez Dog, and I back up work-related items to it whenever I get The Fear (I also use SuperDuper and Time Machine with an external Firewire drive for regular clones/backups).

And the iMac is The Main Device. It’s how most of the Mad Dog media is generated, save for the cartoons, which get done the hard way — drawn in pencil, then inked, and finally scanned into a superannuated 1999 G4 “Sawtooth” AGP Graphics Power Mac, where I apply color using Classic mode and a full CMYK version of Photoshop (4!) that I got for free with a scanner about a thousand years ago. Hey, it still works.

I thought I might do the iMac today, too, but wimped out. Paranoia strikes deep, as the fella says, and I’d like to fiddle with the Air a bit to make sure it didn’t lose a kidney to Somali pirates or something during the operation.

The TurkenCam® goes live

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Your host, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment).
Your host, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment).

Live from the Tower of Power at the ultra-posh Chez Dog in cosmopolitan Bibleburg, it’s the TurkenCam!

• Late update: I’m taking ‘Is Lordship off line for a bit while I sift through some options to this beat-up old USB webcam and take a bit of healthful outdoor exercise.

• Even later update: Anyone dying to see KittyVision® in TurkenScope© will be sorely disappointed with me and my antiquated technology. Dead batteries, lost cables and general ineptitude have delayed production of our Magical Menagerie Tour. But don’t touch that dial. …

Confession is good for the … what, exactly?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

A casual check of the Innertubes this morning confirms that I chose correctly in deciding to skip Ol’ Whatsisface’s latest made-for-TV reinvention.

Eddy Merckx is “extremely disappointed.” Tour de France honcho Christian Prudhomme called it a “calculated public-relations exercise,” while WADA chief John Fahey dismissed the performance as delivering “nothing new.”

Greg LeMond said he didn’t see “the need for redemption, the remorse of someone who is truly sorry.” ESPN’s Bonnie Ford called his resort to “big-picture pop culture”  a “delusional move, not to mention an utterly backward one, describing Ol’ Whatsisface as “a toppled despot, a statue pulled off his pedestal, [whose] legs are still moving reflexively in the rubble.”

And Betsy Andreu was pissed, saying Ol’ Whatsisface owes more to her and “to the sport that he destroyed.”

There’s more of that sort of thing to be had, if you’re game. I’m not. The whole thing is, as John Steinbeck wrote of other parties thrown by professional hostesses, “as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.”

For The Cyclist Who Shall Not Be Named it’s just another step along a well-worn path. First Soaprah, then Betty Ford, then “Dancing With the Stars.” Or maybe a reality show like the one Pete Rose has ginned up for himself.

Whatever. Stage two is tonight, of course, but Ol’ Whatsisface is already way off the back. He’s proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it’s not about the bike. It’s not about the sport. It’s all about him.

The parting glass

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 35 Comments
The parting glass
A fine wine turned to vinegar.

Longtime fans of the DogS(h)ite know that we don’t do cable TV here.

We partook, briefly, in 2006, when I reasoned that I needed TV with all the fixin’s to help me help VeloNews.com cover the 2006 Tour de France. When Floyd tripped the Dope-O-Meter® I jerked the cable out of the wall and that was that.

Now we have rabbit ears, a Blu-Ray disc player, and a Mac Mini for streaming video over the Innertubes. And watching TV has become arduous, as it should be. We can’t just punch a button on a remote and let the high-def bullshit wash over us like the incoming tide. It takes some thought, and that thought is usually, “I think I’d rather do something else.”

Which brings me to the impending multimedia extravaganza in which The One Ball To Rule Them All will bounce into Soaprah’s expansive lap to wallow in his own stink for a couple-three hours. It will be “broadcast” on Soaprah’s TV network, such as it is, and streamed simultaneously on her website, and I have decided that rather than bring the snark, live and in poison, I will shun both of those venues as though they were infested with vermin, which, come to think of it, they will be.

Fact of the matter is, I think I’d rather do something else.

I can see why The One Ball Etc. and George W. Custer got along so famously. There is not a gram of shame in either of the sons of bitches, and when not on the clock I will be pleased to listen to whatever they have to say when they say it under oath, with the threat of hard time hanging over them like Damocles’ sword. Because in a world with its collective head screwed down tight, the only cameras these two would face would be of the closed-circuit variety, and their only audience a sleepy guard.

Here’s a thought. Instead of giving The One Ball Etc. and Soaprah what they so desperately crave — attention, which in this world translates to money — why not give some money, or some time, to a worthwhile cause? Spend a couple hours walking dogs at your local Humane Society, wash dishes at a soup kitchen, fix a creaky bike for a kid.

Let ’em do their playacting before an empty house, and drink a toast to the eventual ringing down of the curtain in this theater of the absurd.